Ganesh

by Malcolm Bosse

  “It is a holy Hindu prayer.”

  “Are you a Hindu?”

  Jeffrey couldn’t reply to that question. Before his father’s death he would have said, “Of course, I’m a Hindu.” Now he wasn’t sure.

  Before he said anything, however, the girl added another question, “What did you tell Tom Carrington?”

  “Tell him?”

  “You must have told him something, because he’s sore at us kids.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Tom said the mantra was probably like the Lord’s Prayer for an Indian.”

  “Tom Carrington said like that?” Jeffrey found it hard to believe that the tall, laconic boy had defended him.

  “Tom would,” Lucy said offhandedly. “Well, are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “A Hindu.”

  “I’m not sure,” he said frankly.

  The girl frowned, as if not believing him. “Which means at least you aren’t Christian.”

  “No. I am not being that.”

  “Are you sore?”

  The use of “sore” was new to Jeffrey, yet in context he understood its meaning. “No, I am not being sore. But I am being surprised.”

  “At what?”

  “That making fun of a prayer would be fun.”

  The girl’s lips trembled. “Don’t make so much of it.”

  “I will not.”

  “Good!” she snapped and wheeled her bike around him. “We didn’t mean anything!”

  No, Jeffrey thought, not the way you pronounced the mantra.

  That evening he wrote a letter to Rama. He described the transatlantic trip, the feel of cold weather, the look of the old house (as big as your own, Rama!), his nice aunt, the tall kids in his new school. He ended by writing:

  I miss you, I miss our swimming and cricket. Do you still bat as well as ever? And have you found anyone to catch vipers with? I’m sure not going to find anyone to catch snakes with me here. But I am not really so lonely. There is my aunt and the house and soon I will know more kids at school. But I miss you. Say hello to Subramanian, Kuppuswamy, and Vasu. Write. Always write.

  Your friend,

  Ganesh.

  The Gayatri Mantra vanished from the school corridors within a week. No longer a fad, it was forgotten as quickly as it had been learned. Slowly people began making contact with the boy from India. They borrowed a pencil, asked the time (although Jeffrey didn’t own a watch), questioned him about school: Did he like it? Was the work harder where he came from? Were the hours the same? He did like it; here the work was harder for him; the hours were shorter. The questions were polite, but not deeply curious, and never asked with the eagerness he showed in answering them. Yet Jeffrey understood it was only through this slow process that he would fully enter the life of the school. “Patience and hope,” his grandfather used to say.

  Even so, Jeffrey yearned to bridge the gap between two worlds: one he had not wholly left, the other he had not wholly entered. It occurred to him one warm spring day after school, as he watched some boys running on the cinder track, if perhaps Yoga might answer this need: Yoga, which he had learned in India, but could practice here in America. On the day his father died, Jeffrey had given up Yoga, just as he had given up everything else: the Hindu gods, the village life, his expectations of the future. But watching the boys run, he felt the desire to do his own kind of exercise, to reacquaint himself with something that had meant a lot to him in the past.

  Entering the school gym, he found it empty save for Tom Carrington, who was shooting baskets on the court. For a few minutes Jeffrey stood in the entranceway and watched. Tom Carrington rose high in the air and with one big hand, curved at the wrist into a shape reminding Jeffrey of a cobra’s hood, held the basketball poised a moment, then drove it down through the net, like a carpenter driving a nail into wood. In his own body Jeffrey felt a sense of exhilaration. He watched the tall boy move with rhythmic grace across the floor, keeping the ball in motion, thumping it up and down with a touch that seemed wonderfully delicate for such huge hands. Abruptly the long body went up into the air, legs together but relaxed as if floating in space, with the arm straight, with the wrist curved like a snake’s hood above the basket before the ball struck. Clean. Not even stirring the webbed net.

  The sight of this graceful performance gave Jeffrey added encouragement to try Yoga again. Changing into gym shorts in the dressing room, Jeffrey went into the wrestling room laid with mats. Along one wall was a mirror, and for a brief time Jeffrey stared curiously at his image: small, thin, freckle-faced, blond. He recalled that in the village he sometimes went home, lifted the veil from the mirror (no one left a mirror unveiled; it was the custom), and studied his pale skin, his squinting blue eyes, his yellow hair. None of the boys at the Mission School ever looked as rumpled, as uncomfortable as he did. They were made for the sun. How he had envied them their rich brown skin!

  Standing on the mat, Jeffrey put the palms of his hands together in a gesture of respect, as if his Yoga master was there to be honored. Then, with determination, Jeffrey began to practice asanas, moving from one pose to another, testing his ability to conform to those patterns that his muscles had learned with such patient effort. With a quickening of his senses, Jeffrey understood nothing had been lost. Here in this American gym his body and mind were recapturing the past. Proceeding from asana to asana — standing, sitting, lying — he understood with deep pleasure that the customs of different countries need not destroy a discipline well learned. He practiced a long time, then showered, dressed, and rode his bike into the darkness, whistling an Indian folk song.

  *

  “Wait!”

  Jeffrey turned and in the street light saw the tall figure of Tom Carrington approaching fast on a bike.

  “Wait!” When Tom pulled alongside, he was breathing hard. “You left just as I went into the shower. Thought we could ride together. We go in the same direction.”

  “I know. I went to your house once.”

  “Yeah, you did, didn’t you,” Tom observed sheepishly. “You didn’t have much fun.”

  “Oh, I did!” Jeffrey didn’t know what else to say. They rode awhile in silence.

  “I’m working these days on my hook shot,” Tom said abruptly. “By next season I figure to have it down pretty good.”

  Jeffrey nodded, without understanding what a hook shot was.

  “What I hope for,” Tom continued in the earnest tone of someone carrying on a conversation earlier interrupted, “is to be six foot seven or eight, so I can play forward. Forward’s my natural position. If I stop growing under six foot six, I’ll have to play guard, and I’m not fast enough. If I go past six eight, I’ll end up as a center, getting my teeth knocked out under the basket.” Pausing, he then added, “So I have about five inches left to grow.”

  Jeffrey never suspected that Tom Carrington would talk so much.

  “I figure on making All State forward as a junior. That’s not bragging, that’s just confidence. Father says, if you don’t have confidence, you don’t have anything. Like you, for instance. You have confidence.”

  “Me?”

  “Sure. I peeked in the wrestling room while you were practicing. It’s Yoga, isn’t it? I saw some on TV.”

  Jeffrey nodded.

  “I never saw it done that good on TV. You did it better. Differently.”

  The boys pedaled a block before Tom continued, as if having thought out exactly what he wanted to say. “You did Yoga like it was easy. Like you weren’t thinking about it. You just did it, like it was part of you.”

  “That’s the way Yoga must be. Thank you,” Jeffrey added.

  “But I bet it’s not easy.”

  “No, it is not. It is to calm the mind.”

  Tom cocked his head, puzzled. “Yeah? Don’t see how you can be calm while curled up that way, like a pretzel.”

  Jeffrey said nothing. They rode awhile longer in silence.

  “Here’s
my turn,” Tom said and slowed to a halt. “I’ll meet you at the bike rack tomorrow night, after we practice. Say, about six? We can ride home together. Okay?”

  Jeffrey nodded, so surprised and delighted that he had nothing to say. The two rode off in different directions.

  *

  And so it began. Each night they met either in the gym or at the bike rack and rode home together. In a half-hour ride they talked about a lot of things — or rather Tom did. Jeffrey had certainly got the wrong impression of him: Tom was open and friendly. He was honest too. He admitted — without embarrassment — that a lot of kids had been shy of Jeffrey. And some called him “The Pale Mouse,” because he looked scared.

  “But you weren’t really scared,” Tom observed matter-of-factly. “We stopped calling you ‘The Pale Mouse’ after you held your breath so long.”

  “I guess I was a pale mouse,” Jeffrey admitted.

  “Well, you never said much.”

  “I was not knowing what to say.”

  “And when teachers called on you, you jumped to attention!”

  “I was taught like that.”

  “Were you taught to hold your breath so long too?”

  “Yes, I can show you.”

  “I’d like to learn.”

  It was clear to Jeffrey that everyone, himself as well, had been foolishly timid. Even Tom confessed one evening, “When I asked you home, I didn’t know what to talk about. What do I know about India? It’s a big country. People are poor. They have plenty of snakes. Do they really have a lot of cobras?”

  Jeffrey explained then not only cobras but banded kraits, Russell’s vipers, and sawscale vipers. Each question that Tom asked was an invitation to explain India, and so after a while Jeffrey was talking as much as Tom. He explained the monsoon season: how, where he lived, they had rain only one month a year, and if they didn’t receive enough water to last the other eleven months, there was drought, famine, and death. He described getting up at dawn to bathe in the river alongside buffaloes. For breakfast he’d have strong coffee with hot milk and rice cakes eaten with a coconut chutney. He told of rice planting time, when women in bright saris would wade through the flooded paddies, transplanting the tender shoots while their employer stood on the bank under a black umbrella. With other boys he played cricket outside the village; his friend Rama, even smaller than he was, was a great batsman who wanted someday to play with the All India team against Pakistan. There was a lot of sickness in the village. People died of typhoid, dysentery, and malaria. There were lepers too with only knobs for fingers and stumps for feet. At night you could see all of the stars above the palm trees, because only a couple of houses were as tall as three stories.

  Tom would listen and mutter, “Yeah.” Gravely, he took in these impressions of another world.

  Soon they were walking together down the halls of school. Because of his association with the basketball player, Jeffrey was quickly accepted by other boys, especially athletes. A few times Tom even brought them to watch Jeffrey do asanas in the wrestling room. In silence they stood around while he slipped easily from one pose to another, twisting, gliding through an internal silence into “pretzels,” as Tom called asanas. A few boys tried — Phil Booker, an all-around athlete, tried especially hard — but none could do the Supta Kurmasana, the tortoise pose, or Urdhva Kukkutasana, the strutting cock, both of which required not only strength but uncommon suppleness and balance. Finally, with a scowl and a curse of defeat, Phil Booker gave up. A football player, staring appraisingly at Jeffrey, said, “Maybe you’re small, but you’re some athlete.” Jeffrey volunteered to teach them asanas. “If I can do them, you sure can,” he acknowledged generously.

  Afterward, biking home with Tom, he asked why those fellows took him for an athlete.

  “To do that stuff you have to be an athlete,” Tom observed sensibly.

  Jeffrey accepted the explanation, but could not really think of himself as athletic. In the village the practice of asanas was merely a prelude to meditation. Jeffrey’s guru would have laughed contemptuously at the idea of Yogis being athletes. He would have dropped Jeffrey as a student had the boy thought of these physical exercises as being anything more than preparation for spiritual ones.

  But the fact that Tom and the other boys accepted him was enough for Jeffrey. Moreover, his skill at Yoga, voiced through the halls, enhanced his reputation with girls as well, all save Lucy Smith, who had stayed clear of him ever since their meeting at the bike rack and their talk about the Gayatri Mantra. Now and then, during class, Jeffrey would feel someone looking at him from behind and turn his head quickly in Lucy’s direction. Sometimes he caught her eye, but she never gave him time to smile.

  It was nearly the end of the spring semester. With sunlight remaining longer, he and Tom rode out of town into the countryside, a green checkerboard of newly planted corn and wheat fields, with red silos glittering in the blue air. Or they biked to a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. Panoramic miles of midwestern farmland receded until at the horizon they merged in color with the sky. Jeffrey liked this view. It reminded him of the vastness of India — the raw power, the awesome beauty of it. “What is that?” he once asked, pointing across the river, near the bridge, where a lot of tractors, graders, and other machines were parked.

  “The new highway,” said Tom. “Once across the bridge and through town, that highway is going to head for the state capital.”

  To Jeffrey it had the appearance of a long, flat snake at this distance, with a black stripe down its back, crawling through the green land.

  “Do you have highways like it in India?” Tom asked.

  Jeffrey laughed. “In our village we have two narrow paved roads. The rest are being dirt.”

  One evening when Tom veered off to follow his own street home, he halted abruptly and said, “Have you got a nickname? Jeffrey is really stiff.”

  “In the village they called me Ganesh.”

  “Ganesh? What kind of name is that?”

  “The name of an elephant-headed god.”

  Tom chuckled. “You let people call you that?”

  Jeffrey waggled his head, south Indian fashion. “Ganesh is the Remover of Obstacles. Yes, I liked it.”

  “If you liked it there, you might as well be called the same thing here. From now on, you’re Ganesh.” Tom waved and rode off into the darkness.

  After dinner that night, while Aunt Betty watched television, Ganesh wrote another letter to Rama, describing the tall athlete who had befriended him, his daily life at school, his wonderful new bike. He had nearly finished the letter when it occurred to him that he had asked nothing about the village, nothing about his friend.

  So after a long thoughtful pause he wrote:

  I must never forget you and our friendship. It is easier for me to forget than it is for you. Do you see? I am living in a new world, but you remain in the one we shared. So you must tell me everything. You must keep my memory alive. I count on you, my friend.

  Yours,

  Ganesh

  Part III

  In the last weeks of the spring semester Ganesh moved deeper into his new life. When a teacher asked him to give the class a talk on India, he accepted — encouraged by Tom Carrington, who bluntly pointed out that “anybody who can turn into a pretzel can talk to a bunch of kids.” So Ganesh told them the same things he had privately told Tom. Then other teachers invited him to talk. He accepted their invitations too, emboldened by success. Each time he spoke there was a change in him physically. The first time he stood stiffly, hands flat against his sides in the Mission School style of recitation. The second time his hands began to relax, the fingers even curled a little, and one leg took his weight. The third time he smiled and finally looked straight into the eyes of his audience. He had not yet mastered the American accent, much less idiom, and whenever he confused v’s and w’s, the kids giggled, but Ganesh didn’t mind at all. What mattered was their calling him “Ganesh” in the hallways between cl
asses.

  The last week of school was approaching, and Ganesh had a goal in mind: he wanted to ask some of the kids to his house. The problem was, he didn’t know what to do with them once they came. He lacked both a phonograph and a knowledge of American music, let alone the ability to dance to it; unlike Tom, he didn’t have a pool table to provide entertainment. Back in the village, kids often went for a walk or sat under a tree watching the sunset. It was enough there. But Ganesh realized that here the kids wanted more to do. He decided therefore to begin modestly by having only one person home — his friend Tom — before asking others.

  One evening as they rode together, he asked Tom shyly, “Will you come to my house for tea tomorrow?”

  “For what?”

  “For tea and biscuits.”

  After a long pause, Tom agreed. When they parted, he observed with a wry smile, “It’s the first time I was ever invited for tea.”

  Ganesh was pleased, excited, and shaken by the acceptance. He pestered Aunt Betty with instructions about tea the next day. She must get tasty biscuits — he meant cakes — and Darjeeling tea and some other sweets. She laughed. There was only one gourmet shop in town and if this Darjeeling tea wasn’t there, it was nowhere to be found.

  Ganesh was not deterred. At least the tea must be prepared from loose leaves; the American tea bag would not provide a proper taste.

  “Yes, your highness,” his aunt gave him a low bow.

  The next day, when the two boys hiked up to the house, it was sunset; the tall gray house loomed high above the tree tops, now ringed with a liquid orange light.

  Getting off his bike, Tom stared up at the weather vane. “I’ve seen this house before. When I was a little kid, I thought it was haunted. So did other kids.”

  Ganesh was puzzled. “Why?”

  “Because it’s so old.”

  When they entered the house, Aunt Betty was waiting in the parlor. Ganesh noticed at once there was something different about her. Usually she greeted him with a cheery hello, some chatter. Today she was oddly subdued and hardly spoke to Tom. Her face seemed drawn, her eyes large and sad. This sudden change from her usual buoyancy startled Ganesh, who watched curiously as she brought in the tea tray and then silently left the room. It rattled Ganesh, who was already nervous about hosting the tea.